by paterson » Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:54 pm
Marc Denis was one of the best top 40 jocks in Canada. I heard him in the 70's at CKGM Montreal and he was great. Respect the fact that he worked at english and french radio stations. He was in Toronto a few decades ago for about 7 years I think at EZ Rock.
Ottawa/Gatineau is a really underrated and unique radio market in my opinion. They have 35 radio stations in total and everytime I go to visit family I really enjoy listening to the radio. I don't really understand what the french stations do with their music. I listened to NRJ and Rouge radio (both owned by Bell) around 2 on a Saturday afternoon when I was driving in and both stations were playing mostly english music. And they do these music mixes of about 7 or 8 songs and play one or two minutes of a song mixed into another. Most of these songs were english, and I wasn't sure if there was some sort of theme to these.
But french stations are supposed to play 60% french music overall so they must go some hours with all french songs. And they play a lot of cancon since most of the french hits are local (they play very little from france or europe) and I noticed even with the english songs they were still playing some cancon, I heard Down With Webster and Ruth B. so they play way over 35%.
And Ottawa still has the hit/non hit rule and to be honest this didn't sound bad at all. On the english top 40 stations like JUMP and Hot FM, the non hits were very well chosen and fit in perfectly with the "hits." All they seem to do is just rotate in another cut from whoever is really popular right now and put that into the regular rotation. However, a lot of stations also bury their non hits later in the evening too.
Funny, I was just talking about this on another radio forum a few weeks back (Southern Ontario Western NY) SOWNY forum, and a few of the other posters chimed in about the market, one poster thought they had too many stations. I am surprised Numeris doesn't consider them a major market since they have a ton of radio in the region and between Ottawa and Gatineau you are looking at about 1.3 million people. They have a good variety of talk, sports, country, top 40, rock, alternative stations, bunch of CBC/Radio Canada, religion, even a kids french radio station, so it is a real competitive radio market.